My Review of Bram Stoker's Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm finding this review difficult to write.

It's been a long time between blood red drinks with this novel. I've read it once before, many years ago, and my response to re-reading it is to drop it from 5 stars to 4.

Stoker's writing style is an uneven mix of brilliance and tedium. His plot development ranges from magnificent to flawed.

His drawing of characters is basically two dimensional and I have to search hard to find examples that provide a greater depth. (I.e. characters are either all good, or all evil, with little in the way of shades of grey. Noting that Renfield, is by his final actions, one of the few characters that shows dimensionality....)

I know some who found the beginning slow. I would disagree. I found the initial journey of Jonathan Harker to Dracula's castle and his subsequent trials and tribulations there to be brilliantly composed narrative. There is a slow and steady progression from hints to warnings to threats to manifest risk of death and worse than death enslavement of the soul to forces beyond darkness.

The visual depictions of Dracula descending the vertical walls of his castle and the spooky manifestation of Dracula's brides is effective and affective writing.

The log of the Demeter is another masterwork of the slow advance of impending doom. The hint of a threat that grows with each night as one by one the crew disappear. Until it is a ghost ship that comes to land in Whitby, Yorkshire. This is manifest brilliance.

To say that Lucy Westenra cops it in the neck would be a bit trite. Her eventual fate left me inspired to write a Haiku.

Bloofer lady prowls.
Moonlight reveals blood stained hearts.
Hammer strikes - I'm Free!

Mina Harker (the primary hero of this story as she is the one who has to confront the greatest risk and persevere beyond it) is the brains (on multiple occasions) behind the operations of the Van Helsing Vampire Hunting Club.

Mina gets left behind while the boys go galavanting about Carfax looking for evidence of Vlad and when the obvious happens - no one notices. It's a raging plot flaw (i.e. Major hero gets in trouble because everyone is suddenly as thick as two short planks) I hadn't noticed in my earlier read. I must be getting pickier about such things as I get older...

I would also like to note that Stoker's use of a psychic connection between Mina and Dracula is strikingly echoed in multiple ways by J.K. Rowling with Harry and Voldemort. I think also for the same purpose, as the psychic link is used to move the narrative forward in both Dracula and the Potter books.

Some things I didn't like which got in the way of the telling.

The use of vernacular by anyone not in the Van Helsing Vampire Hunting Club such as "'ere like tha'..." Was positively grating.

Van Helsing's speech was mostly annoying for the same reason as we are asked to 'appreciate' that this learned dutchman can't speak grammatical English...

On the question of writing the whole novel in epistolary form (letters, diary notes, log books, etc). I think it works very well for this novel. However, something could be missing. What I would like to see is a great big diary written by Vlad Dracula...

The bottom line: I love the story but I don't always love how it was written. Would I recommend it? Yes. Well worth reading for those moments of brilliance that have carried this story for more than a century.



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